Technical Field
The present invention relates to control networks, more specifically to control networks leveraging RF communication standards, such as near field communication standards and Bluetooth Low Energy standards, for distribution of presentations, and more specifically to systems, methods, and modes for live presentation sharing between meeting presenter's and meeting attendees' portable electronic devices during a meeting.
Background Art
Today, electronic presentations are an essential part of corporate meetings and academic lectures. Presentations help the presenter to express ideas and provide visual information to attendees complementing the presenter's speech. Electronic presentations generally combine text, graphics, videos, and other type of content in a series of slides using a presentation program, such as PowerPoint®. The slides can be static, or can be animated by the presenter in a variety of ways.
In a conference or meeting room, users traditionally connect to a display screen via awkward wired connections, typically via Video Graphics Array (VGA) or High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), to present presentation content. Increasingly, this connection is being made wirelessly—a more convenient option for many users. However, current wireless solutions suffer from many setbacks and there are continuing efforts to improve their functionality.
Solutions are available allowing screen sharing from portable electronic devices to conference room display screens. To accomplish this, the portable electronic device or the content source must be first paired with a presentation rendering device connected to a display screen located in the conference room. Currently, this can be accomplished in one of two ways, both of which require inconvenient user interaction. In one implementation, the connection parameters of the presentation rendering device must be entered to the portable electronic devices. Such connection parameters may not be readily accessible to the user and are tedious to enter. Consequently, this can often be burdensome and impractical. In another implementation, the portable electronic device can perform a discovery stage to discover electronic devices it can connect to via a Wi-Fi network, and display a list of the discovered electronic device to select from. In large corporate buildings or similar facilities, there may be hundreds or even thousands of conference rooms of various types. It may become burdensome for a presenter to find the appropriate display screen to connect to from a long list of devices. As such, users desire a less burdensome system and method for wirelessly connecting their portable electronic devices to audiovisual equipment in a conference room.
Moreover, meeting attendees must generally view and follow the presentation on a single meeting room display screen navigated at the command of the presenter. Often, however, not everyone in the room can easily view the display screen, especially if the room is large or the screen is small. Another problem is that everyone in the room must follow the presentation along with the speed of the presenter because they are all looking at the same screen. As portable electronic devices became readily available, attendees often bring their own devices to meetings and would like to view the presentation on their screens. While solutions exist for sharing content with attendee's portable electronic devices, they suffer from many setbacks and need improvements in functionality.
For example, a presenter is able to share a presentation with the attendees by manually sending them a copy via electronic mail or by posting a link to the presentation for download from a website. The presenter may not have access to all of the attendees' email addresses and sending an email of the presentation to a large number of attendees of a large scale meeting is cumbersome and impractical. Also, presenters and attendees may not have access to a website to upload or download a presentation. Additionally, attendees must settle for manually navigating through a local copy of the presentation. Moreover, to navigate through a local copy requires a copy of the software used to make the presentation, which may be costly and unattainable to some users.
Solutions also exist that capture static images of a presentation at a predetermined periodic intervals and provide these images through a website for meeting attendees to view on their portable electronic devices. This solution requires the meeting attendee to enter an IP address to the website, which the meeting attendee may not know or have access to. The solution also suffers from latency and inaccuracy as the static images are only updated at predefined intervals, which may be inconsistent with the speed the presenter is navigating though the presentation slides. Slides or slide content can be erroneously skipped and the presenter may be showing updated slides on the main meeting screen which the meeting attendee has to wait to appear on his screen.
Often meeting attendees want to take additional notes, zoom in a slide to better view the content, go back to previous slides, or perform other manipulations. However, the aforementioned systems lack any meaningful way to annotate or manipulate the shared presentation. An attendee has to either take notes manually or open a separate program to record notes, which is often difficult to fit within the same screen as the shared presentation. This also results in a plurality of discontinuous files that the attendee needs to track. Annotating the presentation within the presentation creating program is difficult, may deteriorate the original presentation, and as described above, requires the attendee to have a copy of the presentation software.
As illustrated above, there is currently no meaningful way to share presentation content between a plurality of portable electronic devices during an in person meeting. The ever-expanding reach of smart portable devices has recently extended to building automation. Smart phones and tablets are increasingly providing convenient and varied control options for residential and commercial buildings. While the introduction of smart portable devices to home automation has had a noticeable positive impact, existing systems do not fully leverage the capabilities of current generation smart phones and tablets. One such capability is short range communication technologies such as near field communication (NFC) or Bluetooth.
NFC is a set of standards for short-range wireless communication technology that employs magnetic field induction to enable communication between electronic devices in close proximity. The technology allows an NFC-enabled device to communicate with another NFC-enabled device or to retrieve information from an NFC tag. This enables users to perform intuitive, safe, contactless transactions, access digital content and connect electronic devices simply by touching or bringing devices into close proximity.
NFC operates in the standard unlicensed 13.56 MHz frequency band over a range of around 2-4 cm and offers data rates in the range of at least 106 kbits/s to 424 kbit/s. NFC standards cover communication protocols and data exchange formats and are based on existing radio frequency identification (RFID) standards. The standards include ISO/IEC 18092 and those defined by the NFC Forum, a non-profit industry organization which promotes NFC and certifies device compliance. There are two modes of operation covered by the NFC standards: active and passive. In active mode, both communicating devices are capable of transmitting data. Each device alternately generates and deactivates their own electromagnetic field to transmit and receive data. In passive mode, only one device, the initiator devices, generates an electromagnetic field, while the target device, typically an NFC tag, modulates the electromagnetic field to transfer data. The NFC protocol specifies that the initiating device is responsible for generating the electromagnetic field. In this mode, the target device may draw its operating power from the initiator-provided electromagnetic field.
Bluetooth is a set of specifications for common short range wireless applications. They are written, tested & maintained by the Bluetooth SIG. The Bluetooth Low Energy technology, introduced in the Bluetooth Core Specification version 4.0, enables devices that can operate for months or even years on coin-cell batteries.
Bluetooth Low Energy operates in the same spectrum range (2402-2480 MHz) as the “classic” Bluetooth technology, but uses a different set of channels. Instead of Bluetooth technology's seventy-nine 1 MHz wide channels, Bluetooth Low Energy has forty 2 MHz wide channels. Additionally, Bluetooth Low Energy technology uses a different frequency hopping scheme than prior Bluetooth technology. These improvements make Bluetooth Low Energy ideally suited for discrete data transfer as opposed to streaming as in previous Bluetooth technologies.
There is now a need to fully leverage the short range communication capabilities of smart portable devices, such as smart phones and tablets, to provide more robust presentation sharing systems. Accordingly, a need has arisen for systems, methods, and modes that provide quick and simple pairing of the meeting presenter's and attendees' portable electronic devices with the presentation system, allowing meeting presenters to present presentation content from their electronic devices on a display screen, and allowing meeting attendees to view the presentation content at their electronic devices, as well as to annotate, manipulate, and further share the presentation content during a meeting.